Overwhelmed?

Having just heard from an old friend recently that’s starting a career in medicine got me thinking again about standing before things in awe. It used to happen much more frequently growing up, but less so as we get older. That sense of losing yourself in a moment, of feeling overwhelmed or even of just having a glimpse at something so large that you forget your place in it all.

An old roommate of mine, deep in the midst of pre-med cramming proved to be no help in this matter. Admittedly some of us were otherwise “funny in the head” at the time, but I loved the idea of reaching your hands into a living person. Something about being able to touch the ghost in the machine, the intimacy of holding somebody’s beating heart, all of it was just so fascinating to us. Well, at least to us not studying it full time. Med students apparently get so used to the tedium of yet another appendectomy, yet another broken bone, it must seem like working on a car. Just a thing you do.

So the thought was, the more you know the less room there is for enjoying the mystery. Back when Corrie and I were “trying” I just couldn’t understand how parents could function around their babies, without being stuck in mesmerizing wonder all the time. How is that mother talking on her cell phone about traffic when there is a little person in a stroller RIGHT THERE? How do you not just stare all the time at this human that you made? That could never be made by anybody else? That is going to grow up to see and do things that we can’t even imagine before putting us in a gray, water-stained nursing home the day we turn 55? How does it not overwhelm you?

Well apparently it does, but you manage to get on with life nonetheless. At first I figured the sleep deprivation probably dulls the senses just enough to change a diaper without staring at it for hours. Then there is the routine of it all. Breast-feeding 10 times a day has got to take some of the mystery out of the process. And seeing how normal it all is, how many people have babies, how down right typical everything we’ll go through is must temper the god complex.

Reading up on the science of it all has helped these last few months. Knowing more or less what to expect, what to worry about, what to dismiss, has provided a nice foundation. But at this point, having not changed a diaper yet, having slept soundly last night, and being able to read a book, watch TV and cook a three-course meal when we want to, we are still blown away by it all.
This is going to be so cool.